Stark Beauty Just Beyond Beijing

ZHIDU, CHINA — Dragon-backed mountains leap against the sky here, in one of China`s prettiest pockets of landscape, miraculously close to Beijing and almost completely innocent of tourists.

The entire Beijing metropolitan area, comprising several hundred square miles of surrounding countryside, opened to foreigners just over a year ago. You can disregard the rusting signs, in Chinese, English and Russian, warning outlanders not to proceed beyond this point about 40 miles south of the city`s center.

What lies in the miles beyond is a starkly beautiful place spelled Zhidu or Shidu (SHE-do). The locals call it xiao Guilin, ``little Guilin,`` after its famous rival, the striking limestone mountains along the Li River near Guilin.

The difference: Guilin-in the southern Guangxi-Zhuang autonomous region near Hong Kong-is a tourist anthill. Zhidu-in Fangxian County southwest of Beijing-you will likely have all to yourself. The catch: it is an all-day trip out of Beijing, four hours each way, and can only be reached by car traveling south of Zhoukoudian, the cave home of ``Peking Man.``

There are no tourist facilities. Apart from a railroad trestle, enormously high and stabbing through the hearts of the surrounding mountains on the way in, Zhidu is as it has been for centuries.

These are dizzying crags, rearing up out of nowhere. It is difficult to believe that here, practically at the doorstep of pancake-flat Beijing, such extraordinary scenery could have leaped up from the earth. The scenery is not Tuscan, but Alpine, with tooth-sharp tines of stone spearing up into the sky, deep gorges in blue shadow, crystal streams filled with flapping ducks, and, as in every valley in China, a small farming village with its yellow shocks of harvest corn and stalks lying in bundles.

The road is paved for most of the way but yields to rough gravel over the last 10 to 12 miles or so. It is a cul-de-sac: you go in as far as you feel confident of your car`s suspension, you pick a place for a picnic, stop, eat, admire, then turn around and come back again.

Horns of rock pierce the sky in thousand-foot thrusts, jutting up sheer from the ground. It is not a landscape for geologists so much as a backdrop for painters or stage designers. It is a riddle how these solid crags of limestone should have such sudden, dizzying voids surrounding them. Why here, and not there? you ask yourself, wondering. Why so high, so sheer in this one spot and so empty a foot away?

It is like cloud-gazing. One sees every imaginable shape, from weathered cones to rippling wave-like peaks, to solid towers of rock, as architecturally massed as castle turrets: cliffs, aeries, tremendous walls. It is an exhilarating landscape, one in which my little boy saw myths hiding everywhere.

``This,`` he said to me solemnly, ``is where the dragons live.`` And it was easy to see horns and claws and gigantic backs arched angrily against the sky in this fantastic labyrinth.

There is solitude, rare in this teeming country. There are echoes, the screech of a solitary rooster and the hiss of wind through the mazy crags. The receding ripples of blue rock are so overleafed that your photographs of them look double-exposed: brown, then gray, then deep blue, then light blue, then a blue so near the blankness of the sky that mountains and air merge.

Above all, there is a keen, selfish pleasure in having hogged a bit of China all to yourself. While the tour buses groan in front of the Friendship Store and the visitors load up on cloisonne ashtrays, you have sought dragons in a far valley, alone.